Volume 3 – Chapter 12: The Unraveling

[August 14 – 47 Days Left]

Thunder or footsteps, nothing real.

It was a hum, a low kind of hum, droning. It resonated enough to suggest the earth itself was murmuring an octave or two in protest underneath their feet. At night, it used to come through as a chair creaking unbeknownst but for those with ears, nearly so, and only when enveloped in utter silence. By day, however, citizens were taking hardly hushed breaths discussing it. Some said it was literally underground. Others vehemently insisted it was all in their heads.

And others said they even understood it.

Kaito had not slept.

His head was still going with memories from the gathering near the train yard. The moment he could shut his mind off, he would see again the half-constructed faces in the circle-unspeaking under the watchful cold flames that night. Again, that peculiar lady's voice came in:

"The meteor is not coming to us. It is coming from us."

He had no clue what it meant, but it had sunk into him somewhere deep inside, thorns digging into him.

---

By noon, side effects had spread weirdly.

Not exactly an illness.

Modified perception...ish.

It was Rika that first mentioned the occurrence.

"The sky blinked," she declared while standing centered in the kitchen, tea cooling in her hands. "Just once. Like somebody opened their eyes behind it."

Haruto, like always, dismissed it as nothing but her being tired, but she was not the only one.

Some very elderly neighborhood lady was painting the walls-just painting the walls. No mural works, no pattern whatsoever. Just white paint, thick layers of white paint over all inside her home. "So that the memories can't climb back in," she told a neighbor before she locked her door and refused to speak again.

The man was outside the community center, muttering to himself the same thing over and over for hours:

"I died already. Just forgot when."

---

Kaito was upstairs with Daichi on the roof that evening, one of the last few spaces that felt open and honest. Here, you could perceive the distance between everything.

"So, do you believe in fate?" Daichi asked.

Kaito laughed humorlessly. "Is that really a question we can still afford to ask?"

"Perhaps now more than ever."

Kaito was silent for a moment; static thoughts were racing in and out of his mind. The longer drone began to hum--the sound rippling just below the surface.

"I don't know what to believe anymore," Kaito said.

"It is impossible for me to owe the world to repetitions of talk, walking paragraphs backing these vanity airs such as mentioned in the record I had thrown away!"

Trying toward an apology for what he had written, Kaito proposed that Daichi bring forth those overshadowed feelings which both would call upon as brothers and sisters at heart.

"This was left behind at the council office. No name; just this."

Kaito opened it. The handwriting was neat, almost calculated.

"On the 40th night, the sky will open. Don't look up."

Kaito's gaze remained fixed on the letter lying on the floor as he posed the question, "And what's so special about this letter anyway?"

"We don't know. But others have been receiving similar notes. All anonymous. All warnings.”

A chill wrapped itself around Kaito’s spine.

---

Later in the night, she was suddenly awakened with screams.

Rika's screams were dreadful yet compelling, drawing Kaito to her side, with a raised heart rate and trembling hands in an effort to calm her.

She wasn't entirely awake.

She kept her eyes open yet couldn't see him.

"Don't take my face," Rika whispered. “They said I wasn't real.”

“Rika-hey, hey-look at me,” Kaito pleaded, brushing hair from her forehead. “It's okay. You're safe.”

But she was weeping now. Silent, shaking tears. Her hands clutched at her throat as if trying to pull something off of her which no one else could see.

Kaito spent the night wide awake.

---

Things got worse by the day after.

Reports came from neighboring sectors of people who fell mid-sentence, others froze in place, staring at walls, whispering numbers no one understood.

Someone had seen a man walk into the lake, then disappear without a splash.

The hum was constant now.

And still-no meteor.

No fire in the sky. No explosion.

Only decay.

Mental. Emotional. Spiritual.

The end would not be announced with noise and fury but be leaking through the cracks into human minds.

---

By evening, an emergency meeting was called by the Council.

The mood was tense, brittle as glass. Nobody raised their voices anymore; everything had to be done in whispers, as the very air seemed now to be hypersensitive.

"It's not a physical event any more," one scientist said. "Or perhaps we never were."

"What are you saying?" someone else asked.

"I am saying that destruction may not come from above."

Heavy silence descended.

Until another voice murmured: "Then from where is it coming?"

Kaito glanced around at the familiar faces now drawn and haunted. Rika was beside him, knuckles white as her hands clutched each other tightly.

Kaito stood.

And spoke from a depth far deeper than logic for the first time in weeks.

"Perhaps the meteor is merely a symbol," he said. "Perhaps it is what we come to accept as the real end when we have convinced ourselves we have already lost; when we yield our minds before the impact even begins."

No one replied.

Because they all knew.

The unraveling had already begun.

And it wasn't from the sky.

It was from within.